Beadle Co. Republican Women’s luncheon speaker
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HURON – A basketball analogy comes to the mind of state Rep. Lana Greenfield when she offers advice to freshmen legislators already having higher political aspirations.
“You’ve got to have a certain amount of bench time,” the third term Republican from Doland said Monday in Huron.
“You’ve got to sit on the bench. It doesn’t do you or anybody any good to think that you’re going to get out there and become a political climber all at once because you’re still a student of the game,” Greenfield said.
“And you’re a student of the game for many years, perhaps,” she said at the Beadle County Republican Women luncheon. “And maybe you’re always going to be that student of the game.”
She says there’s nothing wrong with that. When people put the label of politician on her, she pushes back.
“I’m always quick to tell them my perspective, that I’m not a politician,” she said. “I’m a citizen legislator and that’s all that I want to be.”
But of course Greenfield had accomplished much before she won her first term in the House.
A mother of three and grandmother of three more, she spent much of her career in the classroom as a high school English teacher, the last 26 years in Doland. The Greenfields also owned a convenience store and gas station in Clark for more than 23 years and currently operate a restaurant and lodging area in Doland.
Their oldest, Brock, had been serving in the Legislature for a number of years and some thought he was the one who got her to run for the first time nine years ago.
It was not him, but a young Republican in Sioux Falls who called her while she was at work one day and asked her to consider it.
Taken by surprise, and busy at the time preparing salads for restaurant customers, Greenfield said she’d think about it.
It was her husband, Don, who encouraged her to enter the race. He even went and picked up the petitions for her.
She had been forewarned that campaigning in heavily Democratic Brown County would be a challenge for a Republican, especially so for a first-time candidate, but she set off to meet voters where they lived.